THE NIGHT AFTER that we ate at the big mall, where I also bought an intricately cut parchment hat, tan colored, but made like those expandable paper Christmas bells, and in silhouette much like the charming “mushrooms” now being worn in all the British television series of the 1920s to 1940s, though I was not likely to wear it up home. “Keep it on awhile,” Katie said, during coffee at home afterward. “You remind me of your mother in it.”

Tonight I had been allowed to make the coffee; we were settling in. Though I would have to leave soon. The way younger people always do. We never really catch up.

“Wish I’d seen you in your nurse’s hat.”

“Cap, hon’. Yes, the Mt. Sinai cap—never will forget the day I earned it. Nothing like the dabs they wear today.”

“Didn’t know you trained at Mt. Sinai.”

“Only way the family would let me train was if I was admitted there. I thought it was because they never expected me to qualify, the standards were so high. Hattie—your mother—told me the real reason years later—your mother loved a pun, you know. She said: ‘They actually took counsel on you, Katie. They decided that if ever you set your cap at some doctor, it had better be a Jewish one.’”

I came to tally my mother’s puns only after her death. Only recognizing then how complete and effective her tussle with our language had been—had had to be. Southerners are linguists by nature. People who drink “bourbon and branchwater” do so half listening to the lilt. She must have made up her mind that if English was to be our language supreme, with even her own child consigned to that view of it, then English was what she would conquer. My mother, too, had a tape in her head.

“You and Mother were close, weren’t you.”

“I had Beck, hon’—she had no one. Her own mother died when she was born. A stepmother—’til she came here. No women in your fathers family she could be close to, even in age. You know all that. You wrote about it.”

“Yet I never asked you about her—I don’t know why.”

“We have to figure these things out on our own.”

How good it felt, it always felt, to find someone else brought up to do that. To find that these monastic cells we make for ourselves have a common wall.

“We got close when I came out of the awmy,” Katie said. “Hattie and I.”

When those stern hands of hers fisted, as they did now, they were like two quarters of chicken, each a breast-half with a second-joint thumb.

“Li’l old chickem bones, baby chickem bones,” my father, who couldn’t sing, used to croon to me in my crib. “Chickens are Jewish, aren’t they,” I said one day to the Sunday table, rocking those gathered round the yellow fricassee. “She means our beaks,” an aunt who didn’t have one said. And maybe I did. But what I meant most was our almost daily pore-to-pore sympathies with those fowl and their bone-heaps. When the Holocaust came, I would think again of them and us together, we staining the soup with our yellow armbands, and jerking toward death without our heads.

“She was a German here, you know, all during the waw. That took its toll.”

“I know the neighbor women made it hard for her because she knitted the German way.”

In the American style, the incoming wool, held in the right hand while that needle dives in for the next stitch, is then looped around the point of that needle and drawn through in a movement each time involving the entire wrist, or even the arm. In the more economical German method, the new wool, held to the left and close to the chest, can be nudged in and out by the right-hand needle in a mildly continuous motion that barely shifts either hand.

I used to think that such economies were merely part of the obsessive lore of women, along with how you boiled the said bones for stock. How surprised the Kaffee-Klatsch must have been to find that their small, homely arts could be politics. Or that calling sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” was a not quite sufficient response.

“She had a stepbrother fighting on the German side. She hadn’t seen him since she came here at sixteen. But everybody knew. And do you know, when your father brought over him and his family during Hitler, they produced his picture in uniform, proud as proud?”

“Oh, even when I was a kid she asked me not to speak German anymore to our maid. When I was about six.”

“Uh-huh. And do you know that you went to your father and said: ‘So then can I go to Hebrew School like you did, instead?’”

“No! How extraordinary. That I don’t remember that at all.” I’d thought I knew all my language kinks.

“Your father didn’t like to tell you—that girls didn’t go. So he said he’d teach you. But your mother put the kibosh on it.

I smiled at the old word, never in the mouths of any I knew, except back then. Katie in her dark corner, wan under her pale hair, I in my paper hat—lightly, lightly in the small seagoing boat that is memory we’re skimming toward youth.

“She must have been appalled. She didn’t want to be Jewish.”

That bitterness came back to me: how she had sneered at the name of a high school friend I had brought home, whose head of blond fuzz she had termed “kike hair.” How when I went uncombed or unkempt I was accused of having the same.

“I know. You wrote about it.”

Katie and I had never really talked much about my writing. As with many another writer’s family, she seemed pleased that a member had gotten into print but felt no particular urge to engage with the books except for those that might chronicle the family itself—and this was fine with me. A friend had sent her the early stories, during the years when Katie and I were apart. Later, when we met again, those “family” tales had elicited a few chuckles on her side, but both of us were—I see now—uncharacteristically shy with one another there. I had been unable to write of my parents, or indeed of any of the others, until they were dead. She did not merely approve of this; she took it for granted in the old style—as the deference paid to one’s elders. To her I’d been the “cute” little cousin—in the old sense of “acute”—who had sat on the bottom step of family conclaves and had “sure got everybody’s number”—and she may not have been that wrong.

Now and then she would sometimes ask if I was “on a new one,” in which case I must be “sure to send,” but until the Collected Stories came out I never had—and not since. Because I truly felt she was not much of a reader, and because I had gone so far afield of those. Often her friend Pearl Schulman clipped a review from the New York papers and sent it to her, and Katie would then carefully forward it to me. My husband’s relatives did the same for him, as “their writer.” Family solidarity was being expressed, not readership—and between Katie and me that was enough. Enough to know that she approved of what I had done with my life.

Otherwise, I knew what I wanted of her. I wanted us to stay together, in the pristine time.

Now is she warning me that our wading time in the ever perfectible past is finally over? We have been like two longhaired girls hitching up our skirts in order to dip to the knee in what old verses used to call a laughing brook. Now are we to plunge into the present, in all our clothes?

We two can do that only through the past. That is our cousinship. What she wants of me now is to help her fill in the last corners of that concentric world we all leave behind us.

Where we might be now is at the rim of one of those ledged pools where, from whatever side you approach and descend into the central deep, the edges seem the same. Once you are in, up to the neck or even treading, the waters seal is perfect around you. Then, since you must, you can submerge. With grace.

As long as somebody knows it all?

“When you came out of the army …”

I see her in France in her uniform and army cap, under which hair bunned in the old-fashioned manner might add a feminine elegance beyond any of the then new curly bobs. There would have been men of all tastes over there, some of them veterans all too aware that in the well-run brothel, or behind those showcase windows where the prostitutes sit in Amsterdam or other knowledgeable cities, there is often a “military” type. The attraction of breasts behind sharp tailoring is a basic one—ask any office girl. Even we women ourselves feel it when so clothed, flattening our curves enticingly behind the buttons that hold, or flicking out sex at the point of a horsewoman’s whip.

Add then the army, whose tailoring, on some missions not denied even to women, is always superb. And then, the idea behind “a nurse.” To the coarse, any nurse is already partner to all the workings of the flesh. And that particular war was one in which even the rank and file could spell blond as blonde—hinkey dinkey parlez-vous.

On the other hand, there would have been all these romantic young marksmen from home—straight as flagpoles—whom war recruits for romance. For whom death would have been love’s porn.

And to Katie? To that young nurse on the wards, clipped in her mock uniform, what would the wounded all around her be?

Not hypochondriacs.

“When you came out of the army, I recall the family saying you didn’t look well.”

How the aged manage to accumulate shadow around themselves—is it a talent of fading flesh? The room is actually no darker. Outside is the steady, almost boring Florida light, glaring with late-in-the-day optimism. We eat early here.

“Guess I didn’t.”

“Were you sick?”

“Guess I was.”

“Like—dysentery, or something? Or one of those amoebic infections? That Americans only get when they go abroad?” I gave her a smile. Medical lingo always got her started.

A snort. “Nothing the awmy would increase my pension for.”

Not for wounds they couldn’t see. Yet Katie is proud of her military pension, received to this day. Is this why she feels no need to stand forth at the synagogue?

“Oh, I know they sent you with Mother because they trusted you.” Did I? On tape, that sounded false.

Silence. The business with the compresses has stopped. There are silences like that between attendant nurse and patient, as I have been in hospitals enough myself to know. Late night sea silences with the bed becalmed, and patient telling nurse what the doctor doesn’t know. When the illness is serious enough.

“Naw they didden!” She chokes on it. “Oh, maybe they trusted me to keep quiet on why she was going—but no more. When Clarence was dying I offered to look in on him for free; his bedsores were a sight. But Flora wouldn’t give in.”

Give in—He wouldn’t … She won’t … I hear the phrase the family used when we any of us were stuck in an attitude and nobody could find the scripture that would help us to get out.

“Tell you why they sent me.” She’s using that frail but stern midnight voice—the one that pauses only for truth. “Your mother trusted me. I was the only way they got her to go.”

My mother could not bear to spend an hour in a house where there was an unpaid bill. She had the émigré’s terrible need—and pride—not to owe. Some turn spendthrift for the same reason. But not she. What had Katie given her that had broken down her German chill? What did she owe? I see the two of them in their corner, and their across-the-room glances.

“Because you had told her your troubles? In exchange for hers?”

Waiting for the patient, I listen to the humming of the refrigerator. We are in home care.

“I was young!” The voice is cracked.

And wounded? Where no one could see? Everyone saw my mother’s wounds. But her main audience was against her.

“And desperate?”

I don’t expect an answer. It’s not something our cousin can admit. But misty as this room is, this dim semitropic for old bones, Katie of the brimming eyes is somewhere alive in it. So is cousinship. Cousins may kiss. Cousins may question. This has been my role, as cousin-child. Now the roles reverse. Now I am nurse as well.

When I was a kid I looked up the word diphtheria many times. All the dictionaries say the same thing. The membrane formed is tough. And what they call “false.”

Many in my age group were among the first to be taught mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for the drowning. These days the rescue of the choking is by law a pinup in every city restaurant, though often hidden. The maneuver I perform requires the dark of family knowledge. I feel my mouth salivate with memory.

In the corner is that small, shrinking jaw, as ajar as a sick child’s.

Bend deep, Hot-tense. Deeper than a kiss.

“They sent you down there to recover, too, didn’t they, Katie? To the sea. I remember now.”

I remember the waves at the windows. Constantly arriving, on a stretch of beach that seemed to me not far enough away for safety’s sake. I knew that safety was somewhere involved. I remember the crashing of the sea in one’s dreams, and the bunched sound of late-night crying when it is made by two people.

In the daytime the routine was morning pony rides for me and afternoon rides for all three of us in the rattan sedan-chairs that an attendant to each would wheel, my chair on the inside. Warmer there, and away from the conversation of the other two. But the wind mewling from under the boardwalk brings me their words, sifted with the blown sand under the pilings, and each day forgotten again, except for the name always centered in them, reappearing like a pebble does on the beach foam.

It was a slim Christian name, of the sort that would have slipped past one by the dozens in the good private schools of the time, eeling then into Wall Street—into banking more likely than into stocks—or else into one of the law firms whose names would be a string of its own kind. After which it would normally marry in a top church, acquire the appropriate affiliations and summer haunts—water being favored rather than mountains—and settle down to producing little candidates for good schools.

I didn’t know any of this then. But even at seven I know the name as somehow different from ours, even from the Anglicized surnames like Clarence’s, which was Winstock, or even my own. More important, I hear how when my mother pronounces it she does so with the same sugary lilt with which she alludes to certain New York families in “society,” whose activities are reported in the newspapers, or whose members in one small way or another have touched her own circle—maybe met at a benefit performance at a Fifth Avenue townhouse, or sharing—before her marriage—the same modiste.

Vaguely I know that these people are all Christians, and of a special sort. My Aunt Jo—widow of my father’s elder brother and middle-class Irish—was not included, nor were those male friends of my father’s sporting days who still sometimes invited him to clubs like the New York Athletic Club, though he seldom accepted. Of certain other men whom I would hear of in my adolescence—judges and lawyers with names like Choate and Depew, whom he met at The Hundred Years Association, a club whose members either owned businesses or had other long-term connections with American commerce—I suspect she knew nothing. My father, who in Richmond had mingled with Christians since he was born, and whose sisters had gone to the convent, treated all this as ordinary. A Jew as proud as he could afford to condescend—and could not be condescended to. The only time I ever heard him guffaw at my mother was when she had suggested, if timidly, that we refer to ourselves as Hebrew, rather than Jew. Later seeing him rub the permanently inflamed spots his pince-nez left to either side of the bridge of his nose—always a sign of his irritation, along with his almost inaudible “Harrumph.”

And on that occasion I had heard one of my sardonic paternal aunts say to the other, not too under her breath, “Hattie wishes she had angels’ blood.”

So, rolling alongside sedately in my third chair, as the name, a man’s, always said in full by Katie, came to rest with that certain relish on my mother’s tongue—I at once took it to be the name of someone who must have had just such blood. Why else, when we were about halfway down the boardwalk and after some mournful interchange, would two people be weeping in unison and blowing their noses—except for one of those? I’d have been embarrassed in front of the attendants who wheeled us, except that from day to day the men who wheeled us were always new.

I am the attendant now. Katie’s chair is stationary. Yet something is wheeling us both from behind; I hear its breath. Or is it Katie’s, short and parched?

“Beck came to town to ask Daddy Joe. She hadn’t been to the city in—not since I got my cap. My father had another woman there, Hot-tense. So Beck never went. Her life was in Port. And that’s where I was—

“Yes?” Sometimes that’s all a nurse has to say. But may have to repeat it. “Yes?”

“Lying … low.” It came up like two bits of phlegm.

“So Beck asked Father?”

See how I am saying Father, she Daddy Joe. We used to do that indiscriminately. He was father to so many. In the days when relationship was rightly one’s role.

“She told him: ‘My daughter’s in mortal woe. So is your wife. Send them to cure together.’”

“And he arranged it.”

“Never even asked her why.” She is whispering now.

Yes, that would be his measure.

“Back at Port, Beck said to me: ‘That man is worth his weight in gold, dollin’. But I didn’t tell him your trouble. His women would have got it out of him.’”

Childhood’s sensations are flooding me, mouth-to-mouth. I see my father as I used to see him, padding the corridors of his household like a peddler traversing his beat. One where the super-salesman of downtown is being sold something by somebody every hour of the day.

“So be it,” he would say to me now. “Bend to your task, daughter. It is not necessary to know Hebrew.”

“Your trouble. Want to tell me it, Katie?”

By one of those efforts that exceed the flesh, her face is reassembling, jaw closing evenly, fever gleam glossing the eyes. I see Katie when young. But not as I had ever seen her then. The hair an aureole, blown by the winds of France. The slim neck undamaged. The compress on her knees is a white cap—doffed.

She is as I would wish the women who were rifling my mother’s bureau drawers to see her. No one is here to rifle her own memory-box except me.

“I always thought you a woman who would have been loved by a man. That you must have had you—your love affair.”

I hear only her breath, raucous with the past. Halfway across the room from her I can see the rise and fall of her old chest, and hear its soughing. But I have the power to see her as she was—and she knows it.

“There was a man’s name. You and Mother used to bandy it between you. Riding by the ocean. It’s on the edge of my—ear.”

It mingles with the sea, and with all the surreal in any family. The letters dog-eared by one person’s forefinger and thumb, and burned by another’s. The names filtering on the wind outside the house, and not allowed in. The stories that no debtor can come to collect in exchange for cash.

“Down in Atlantic City you used to say the whole name, every time. Like Beck used to say ‘Solly Pyle.’ But not like it was the name of anybody that did you dirt.”

That does it.

Is the sound she makes a chuckle, grounded way down—at me? Or the suck of a throat opening?

“Hon’—” I say. “Hon’”

The name comes up like a gout of freed air.

And that night the name, always said in full, first name and surname together, sometimes fluttered on her tongue like in a young girl’s account of a date, sometimes marched through the bare facts like a theme worthy of two grown women crying over it in unison.

Why can’t I remember it? Dick—Richard—Atwater? Or did Howard—or Howell—come in somewhere? The surname certainly had two syllables, maybe began with H. The first name sometimes shortened familiarly, but always with the second name following. I can hear the lilt. Or do I now compound it of beach voices and mild winter air just right for recovery? Plus what she told me as part of her plain but not meager sequel—that his family’s money came from that first radio company of note, Atwater Kent?

In the few years left to her the name echoed once or twice between us; I could have repeated it to myself at any time. I never thought of writing it down. Now that she is dead, I find I have forgotten it, no matter how I try. Perhaps that is loyalty?

Or merely how the rescued child survives, yes, but only to tell imperfect tales?

I remember everything else.

“Beck knew,” she’s saying. “I couldn’t trust a letter. But once during my service I came home on leave. And told her we were engaged.”

“Nita know?”

“Naw.” All her estimate of Nita is in that drawn-out syllable.

“Ayron?”

“You kidding?”

“But Mahma knew.” Even now, she takes comfort from that. “He was a doctor, with the army. But not Jewish.” She can smile now, when she says that. “He wanted me to go see his family, while I was on leave. So I went. One of those big townhouses, on Fifth.”

“He wanted them to see you!”

She inclines her head, a little painfully, at my partisanship. “So he did, I guess. And they couldn’t have been nicer.”

“Southerners?”

“New England. But in New York a long time.”

I see the house, see her there, that uniform, those eyes that offer their depth. How can they not approve their son’s choice?

“They’d invited Beck to come, too, acourse, but she couldn’t make herself—extend things that faw. I told them why. Solly Pyle would never … They couldn’t have been—more understanding.”

“So then what? Did Ayron find out?”

I could see him, the brotherly nemesis with the hook, throwing back the unwanted fish. Twice.

“Naw. Not that he could have done anything by then. Except create a fuss.”

Not with the woman she had come to be—Katherine S. Pyle, as later her documents were always signed. I could see that now.

“Solly?”

Her head always lowered when she spoke of him. “I don’t know what was hardest on Beck. That she couldn’t tell him. Or that he wasn’t there to tell.” In the twist of her lip I see hard-soft old Beck saying that. “She said that after I went back overseas she spent more time on her knees than any Catholic.”

“In synagogue?” I don’t recall that we Jews spent much time on our knees there.

“Uh-uh. No—at home. She had to be careful not to show anything extra there. Sister and Brother thought it was because of Sol.”

And her fiancés family? Were they Catholics?

“Protestant. Congregationalists.”

“Oh, those are some of the best,” I hear myself say, encouraging her to marry, sixty years too late. “Daddy always said they were rather like the best of us.” Rather like us, was what he had actually said. “Stern without orthodoxy. And just wishy-washy enough not to want to shed blood over it.”

“Not over that,” she said. “No.”

“Then why didn’t you?” I burst out. “You and he? Ever?”

The minute one says “ever,” one knows why.

“He was keeled.” She says it so quietly that for a minute the accent misleads me. I see a bright sail, keeling over and under. In gray weather.

He was killed shortly before the Armistice. Some doctors saw as much action as any officers, she said. Often without the same protections.

“He could have taken leave same time I did. But with what was going on out there, he couldn’t bear to. He said, though, that I must do it for him. He wanted the family to know.”

He was that kind, then. I was glad to know it. And sorry.

And she was that kind. They could have made a life.

“I didn’t break down until the Armistice. Then they had to send me home. But a lot of us were being sent back normally. So no one but Beck knew the real reason for it.”

“So you came down there, with Mother and me.”

“And the sight of you cured me. Your mother mostly, of course. But you, too. Such an imp, you’d been. And turned so solemn, pore little puss.”

“Our woes? Cured one like yours?”

She shook her head at me. “Uh-uh. I just remembered I was a nurse.”

So, good-bye, doctor. Hathaway. Howard. I have recalled you. But there is no longer any need.

“Did you ever see them again? His family?”

“Oh, yes. His mother wanted to adopt me.”

“Adopt you? A grown woman? What a—To be their—relic?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. He was their only son. She wanted me to have his estate. ‘If you’d had a chance to marry,’ she said, ‘you’d have had it. He’d want me to take care of you. And I want to.’”

She sat back. The coffee was cold but she sipped it. I saw the two of them, at tea.

“She was a lovely woman. And it was a fine house. Beautiful—but good, too. You know how it is, hon’, when the people are good?” She lets that hang, a statement more than a question. Outside the ranch house, whose poreless, sheet-rock walls resist even ownership, that other household we had known together looms out of the night, an ark lifted on the hydrogen of memory—and sails on.

I don’t answer her right away. In the style she and I were brought up in, we don’t have to.

So it’s she who resumes. We were chastised to respect the pace of the story even more than the revelation.

“But I could tell his mother wanted me for more than she knew. And so did he. A fine gentleman, a mite stiff. They dispensed their money, he said, as much as possible phil—what’s the odd word?” She smiled, tired. “As charitably as they could.”

“Philanthropically.”

“That’s it. And they said they thought I could do the same. They knew I’d interned at settlement houses.”

“When people are good—” I said, reaching over to pat her.

“Oh, shoot—I could have fitted in there for right selfish reasons. It was the kind of house—well, I’d seen its like.” She makes the sound I can no longer classify. “No shoats on Fifth Avenue, acourse. But I’d seen it all before. They wanted me for company, too. Would have wanted it, more and more. And I’d have had to deal with that.” She sighs. “I knew places for that do-gooder money they wouldn’t have got to on their own until kingdom come.”

“Then why didn’t you just go ahead and accept?”

“Because I couldn’t do that to Beck.”

“She’d have wanted you to.”

“For sure. And for all the right reasons. So—I didn’t tell her. She’d already asked me shouldn’t she go there, under the circumstances, and pay her respects. ‘That poor woman,’ she said. But by then they were safely gone, to the Orient. She wrote a letter instead.”

People of those days had a melodramatic way of keeping things from one another, grand-opera style. Letters that were somehow never sent—or arrived too late. Meetings that were forestalled; girls that were sent away—just in time. Was it that they wanted to blunt the edge of coincidence before it got to them? And call it fate?

“I’m not too fond of Patient Griseldas,” I said.

Yet, maybe when your lover is killed just a few days before the Armistice, you crave even to counterpart on your own the vicious things that life can randomly do.

“You exaggerate easy,” Katie says. “Y’always did.”

I hear how even to reprove she uses the voice of the family. But how much honor must memory pay to self-sacrifice?

“What if you could have taken Beck with you?” I fling up my hands. “Sorry. One of the wild ideas that people on the sidelines give you gratis.”

“Had it myself, thank you very much. She’d have fitted in like a glove. No one would have appreciated Beck more than them. But—”

“Nita.”

“Nita?” The name conjures her, immovable as an inherited down pillow.

“I could have set Nita up separate. I thought of it. What Nita wanted more than anything was to make a place for herself in Port. She could’ve done a catering shop. She’d have bloomed. My first—philanthropy. I wouldn’t have lived in the Fifth Avenue place—only nearby. Beck and I.” I hear how even a lifetime later the dream can color the voice. “And after that—and I could have set it all up like a three-ring circus, don’t think I couldn’t—what a free nursing station and out-patient clinic Marnine Tooker and I could have run. Harlem Hospital isn’t that far from upper Fifth Avenue.”

She gets to her feet and stirs about in that musing movement which occurs in between the talk but is never pinpointed for the importance it has. Decisions flow then. Murder and fornication are contemplated. Sacrifices are clinched. Stirring about.

Katie, looking about her to ascribe it to something, seizes on the coffee tray, lifting it too smartly for her bent shoulders. I don’t try to take it from her. It’s the old black Tole tray, nearly a yard wide, that used to get sidetracked all over the Port house, whether freshly oiled and on end behind the wildflowers on the sideboard, or on the kitchen counter, steamy behind the jelly bag. She speaks to its center flowers. “Late in the day—for charitable words.”

I hold my breath until she reaches the sideboard with that heavy thing. “Marnine Tooker. Wasn’t that your friend from Atlanta, one you trained with?”

“Ah-huh. Heard from her until she died. Last year.” She has her back to me. Waiting.

“Then, Katie—Katie—why didn’t you do any of it?” That is a terrible thing to ask anyone. The tray, lifted like a weight, sustains her.

“Solly Pyle came home to die.”

She clears the tray. It is returned to the sideboard. In Florida there is no place for it to wander much, no need.

And now, as sure as shinsplints—as we used to say, and whatever did that mean?—there she is hunting us an end-of-story drink.

The Victorian sideboard of that three-compartmented variety in which so many of the South kept their liquor predicts a certain bending to get to a bottle, and a clinking of the brass drawer handles above. I half close my eyes in order not to see—or to see—how Katie’s shadow doubles and blurs into the many I have watched at this task at one time or another. I hear the blunt shove that even when heard from the next room always meant the closing of the sideboards center door. The old word for a liquor supply was “requirements.” One might hear the man of a house use it, in advance of a Sunday evening. “Have we the requirements?” was what was said.

Katie is bringing up the Kahlua—a full gift bottle, untouched—and a bottle of good brandy with a forlorn inch or two in it. “You had a friend—what was her name?—from Harlem.”

I have to think a minute. “Arnella.”

“The names they used to take—my. Those—Blacks.” She sets out the newly furbished tray and turns to squint at me. She has to turn her whole body to do that now. “What happened to her?”

I haven’t a clue. And Katie knows it.

“Okay, you win,” I said. “We graduated. Into the North.”

We each choose the brandy over the Kahlua, which sports a bright streamer citing its comparatively low alcohol content.

“Nothing that won’t hurt you is that good for you,” Katie says.

“Never heard that one.”

“Old, old saw.” She doesn’t—as we used to say—expatiate.

I think: Sol’s old saw.

She sees me think it.

In complete harmony, we drank.

We were eating nonpareils with the brandy when Clay rang—the all-round husband with the gift shelf.

He says he is fibrillating, a word much on the mind down here. Nothing for the ambulance, but for safety’s sake would she come check him out?

“Not that kind of heart trouble old Clay is suffering from,” she says, taking up the black satchel that hangs on the old “costumer” by the door. We say “hatrack” now—if we say it at all. “But I better go. Fact I’m bound to—that’s our agreement.”

I see she is proud of it. “Want company?”

“No, I’ll drive. And I’m goin’ give that lady-killer some homely advice.”

In the doorway she stands, wan but gleeful, all the busted vertebrae aligning at duty’s call. A single lady, but not unattended. What is safety?

“Remember that poster—the Red Cross Nurse?”

It was still in the grammar schools, long after the First World War. You would pay a premium for it now.

She nods, shrugs, grins—signaling some riposte already sweet on her tongue. “Why, honee child—” she drawls. “You still have on that fool hat.”